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Frank Kessel recently completed a 12-year spell as Program Director for the Culture, Health and Human Development Program at the Social Science Research Council. Currently consulting with Canadian groups engaged in inter-disciplinary research on health and with a major New York cultural institution, he was also responsible over the past several years for the SSRC’s Program on the Arts and initiatives at the intersection of the social, psychological and bio-medical sciences. With a primary interest in human development and ancillary issues in the philosophy and history of psychology and the social sciences, as well as matters at the intersection of psychology with education and the humanities, Kessel has held academic positions at the University of Houston, the University of Alberta, and the University of Cape Town. He has also been involved in international early education efforts, first as Research Director of the Early Learning Centre in Cape Town and then as Scientific Associate at the Bernard van Leer Foundation in The Hague. His further connection to the philanthropy sector came as Senior Program Associate at the William T. Grant Foundation in New York.

A major thread in most of these endeavours is Kessel’s commitment to facilitating creative conversations across conventional disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines. This has been reflected in the numerous conferences and symposia he has organised and the range of volumes he has edited, but perhaps most completely in Kessel’s programmatic work at the SSRC, where he helped bring to fruition the collective work of a variety of inter-disciplinary, sometimes international, groups of scholars. In a related vein, he has consistently been concerned with the reciprocal engagement of research and scholarship with broader social issues.

Kessel is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society and a member of several other organizations (such as the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development and the Society for Research in Child Development). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. at the University of Cape Town. His wife, Marion, trained as a classical pianist and percussionist, directs and produces documentaries on the performing arts (focussed on artists such as Edward Albee, Christoph Eschenbach, Maurice Sendak, and Robert Wilson); she also directs multiple cameras for live videocasts of opera performances in public spaces.